E.S. Turner

Ideally, one should be at the peak of fitness before starting to break the heads of Scots barbarians. The Emperor Severus, who undertook this necessary task in AD 208, suffered from gout. It is daunting to think that a man gripped by a malady so exquisitely sensitive to every bump of travel should have been carried in a litter all the way from Rome to Britain, then hoisted over the Hadrian and Antonine Walls to pursue a lot of hairy predators into the Hyperborean wastes. The campaign is described in Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, which I was belatedly reading when Gout: The Patrician Malady arrived for review. Strangely this book does not mention Severus, who is surely one of gout’s great heroes, but it confirms that Gibbon himself was suffering severely from gout while writing his ‘damned thick’ books about Rome. In later life he suffered also from a testicle swollen to the size of a melon, ‘which he did his best to ignore’, as one hopes everyone else did.‘

One does not get far in this book before one’s eye is stopped by the reproduction of an advertisement placed by B. Henderson, of the China Warehouse, Rye Lane, Peckham. Miss (or Mrs) Henderson ‘respectfully informs the Friends of Africa that she has on Sale an Assortment of Sugar Basins, handsomely labelled in Gold Letters: “East India Sugar not made by Slaves”.’ There follows this assurance: ‘A Family that uses 5lbs of Sugar per Week will, by using East India, instead of West India, for 21 months, prevent the Slavery, or Murder, of one Fellow Creature! Eight such Families, in 19½ years, will prevent the Slavery, or Murder, of 100!!’ The mathematical projection may have been rickety, but what houseproud humanitarian could resist a purchase like that? And what housekeeper could fail to ensure that the bowl was always correctly filled?‘

Welcome, then, to this historic spa town, once calling itself the English Montpellier. The cherished waters, ideal for restoring the ‘animal functions’, have been reduced to a trickle from a single tap, hidden away from all but the curious; the Regency assembly rooms are the scene of a one-week monster carpet sale; and the crumbled colonnade for water-drinkers houses boutiques called Smarty Pants, Just Bums and Going for Bust. ‘Call this a spa?’ the valetudinarian out of Europe might say. ‘Where is your Grand Parc des Sources? Where are your salles de pulvérisation? And your first-class gargling-room? Have you no radioactive muds? We do not ask for dew-treading meadows, but what about a quiet garden with rows of brine-soaked hedges?’‘

Old-time shipwrecks are a richer, quirkier subject than most of us imagine. In 1841 the Nautical Magazine listed 50 ‘Causes of the loss of ships at sea, by wreck or otherwise’. In addition to ‘Mistaking of headlands’, ‘Driving on a lee shore’, ‘Sleeping on watch’, ‘Shifting of cargo’ and so on, the list includes:‘

Those who have visited the House of Lords as tourists may remember a notice entreating them not to sit on the Woolsack. Nobody at all will remember a light novel of thirty years ago in which the hero, detained in the Palace of Westminster for contempt of Parliament, was found on the Woolsack passionately entwined with his girlfriend. Reader, I wrote it. I well recall that a film producer of modest fame expressed an interest and asked me whether I thought the House of Lords would lend the chamber and the Woolsack for filming. Eager though I was to sell the film rights, I had to say I thought this unlikely. Not long afterwards the producer died suddenly and that was that.